A very irritating situation. Banned for trying to stop an attack on one of my artistic works.

[Blezmo]

I've had an extremely irritating situation today. On spacebattles forums, another xenforo forum, something odd happened. On spacebattles.com I am known as "The Droog"

On the forum, a member named "Shawn Dawn" posted a thread in the creative writing section of the forum, and that thread was a mockery of a story in progress at a forum called mspa forums. This user named "Shawn Dawn" was apparently some kind of troll. I went to the thread and I posted a statement telling him not to copy and mock my works, and I asked for the message to be deleted.


The issue here is that I was banned and accused of sockpuppeting. I am at a University with over 35,000 people on the same Ip address, and it just so happened that "Shawn Dawn" has the same Ip address as me. So I was banned for "sockpuppeting". I'm starting to ask myself if "Shawn Dawn" could be somebody I know at my college. I never shared any of my works with anyone I know, so I have no idea how he found my story on the internet.

Here is the thread that "Shawn Dawn" made on spacebattles as an attempt to mock a story that I wrote. My Little Pony. Demons and Necromancy is Magic: A story of life and death.
Locked

Here is my original story on mspa forums:
ScrollStuck Mysterium



I also suspect that this "Shawn Dawn" person could be a member at mspa forums.


Now one of the questions I wanted to ask was this,
Are the admins that use xenforo software able to see the location where the ip address is coming from?
If so, then they should know that I am at a university, so they can't just assume that there's a bunch of sock puppets. What makes me even more mad is that now that I'm banned, I have no way of contacting them to tell them about this misunderstanding.


Also, even though the story I made isn't copyrighted and is just a thread, its still wrong for someone to copy and mock another person's works. The stories may seem different, but the only thin he did was convert it into mlp form.

 

[ManagerJosh]

all we see are IP addresses and the reverse lookup. the forum admin would need to perform an investigation on the IP address itself and make that determination for him or herself.

 

[Blezmo]

all we see are IP addresses and the reverse lookup. the forum admin would need to perform an investigation on the IP address itself and make that determination for him or herself.

I thought they would have such a function. I once operated a PHBB3 forum that had software where I could look up a users address, but I disabled that feature because I respect other's privacy. But now it seems that feature would've save me from being banned if xenforo had it. I wish I could contact the mod that banned me.

 

[AlexT]

What does it matter if they can? It certainly won't change their opinion once you've started posting about their mod decision on other websites.

 

[Blezmo]

What do you mean?
I didn't do anything wrong. I doubt they would be mad, I'm just pointing out the misunderstanding.

 

[AlexT]

What do you mean?
I didn't do anything wrong. I doubt they would be mad, I'm just pointing out the misunderstanding.

Pointing something out in a completely different forum? How is this going to help? I am not sure about their policies, but it is common practice in many forums (in particular of that size) that discussions or questions about the actions of the moderating team are not permitted on open forum.

 

[Blezmo]

I can't discuss it there though, this is the only way to contact the admin. I have already sent two of them a message, so atleast I'm being forth coming.

 

[Fufu]

Too bad there is not a solution to ban/block MAC addresses.

 

[AlexT]

Too bad there is not a solution to ban/block MAC addresses.

Well, it would require you to change the way networking works. MAC addresses work at the data link layer. They are not transmitted beyond the first router (at your home).

 

[Blezmo]

Well, it would require you to change the way networking works. MAC addresses work at the data link layer. They are not transmitted beyond the first router (at your home).

I don't know much about networks. Plus I'm at a university, I don't control their network. So I cant do much.

 

[tenants]

Well, it would require you to change the way networking works. MAC addresses work at the data link layer. They are not transmitted beyond the first router (at your home).

It's possible, but I don't feel it is moral to retrieve the MAC addresses via client side (ActiveX / Java Applet), and then send this forward to the server. It's a terrible solution, and I wouldn't ever use it myself (I was looking into it when designing Login Security - IP based protection), that's something I wouldn't recommend doing as core (or even as a plugin)

 

[Mike]

It doesn't make sense to discuss other sites' moderation choices here. Your only recourse is to talk to the administrators of that site.